You Say
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: Yubel is determined that she will be human. Even though she's not anymore. Jyuudai/Yubel. Fifth in the All That We Are series.


**Title**: You Say  
**Series**: Everything We Are  
**Author**: Nina/**TechnicolorNina**  
**Fandom**: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX  
**Pairing/Characters**: Yubel/Jyuudai  
**Word Count**: 5 417  
**Spoilers:** Third season.  
**Story Rating**: R  
**Story Summary**: Yubel intends to be human. Even though she's not anymore.  
**Notes**: Series has a name!  
**Feedback**: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)  
**Special Thanks/Dedications**: Shout-out to Horoko, who provided the lyric translation for the epigram (no, I do not have the original Japanese; sorry about that).

* * *

_I understand this world that I look at with eyes on straight  
Isn't as bad as it may seem.  
While I look off afar, I wait for that first dawn.  
Since right now I can wholeheartedly believe,  
I'll continue to protect what I hold dear.  
Even without words, yes, we can talk to each other, I bet.  
You say, "Always . . . "_

-- "You Say," La-Vie (translation by TnKP)

* * *

It isn't easy being hybrid.

This is the first thing Yubel has learned about her new life. The people in the town talk and chatter, many of them suspicious of their prince's fiancée; the people in the palace have grown used to her new appearance, but still edge around her, speak quietly to her, as though afraid she will tear them in two. There are only three people she knows now to talk to, and one of them will soon be her husband. One of the others, she knows, takes care of her out of duty—Xaquirah, the magician whose skill changed her, made her into her new form. The third is her only true pleasure now—Kanti, the tutor of her childhood. That he speaks to her at all is a miracle; their first meeting after Yubel's transformation was entirely by accident, and she reacted to his presence the same way she reacted to all surprises and accidents in the first few weeks after her change: by flaring her wings and hissing at him.

Most of the palace servants who ran afoul of her during what she now thinks of as "the bad times" no longer speak to her if they can avoid it, and it is a loss that makes her ache. Kanti, though, is unlike those Yubel once counted friends in one very significant way: he has studied dragons, and thinks of them not as monsters but simply creatures like any other—dangerous, yes, but intelligent, and not bloodthirsty and without loyalty. And so when they ran against each other that day in the hallway, he simply made a knee and bared the back of his neck, a gesture Yubel's human side did not recognise and that her new nature saw as "safe," friendly.

Since then it is to Kanti that Yubel has taken all her worries, even when Xaquirah asks her questions about the new, dragonish side of her nature. It's somehow far less embarrassing to make her queries of Kanti, as though she is still his student, than to ask the same questions of Xaquirah, who seems interested in the answers only so far as they affect his research.

It is from Kanti that she has learned that the pleasure she feels when Jyuudai touches her wings is probably a result of his being the first person to join her new flight and therefore the most likely to be her mate, a piece of information Kanti supplied in the dry, pleasant tones of one who has taught for years for his bread and wine and has mostly enjoyed it. He is also the one who has told her that her new and incessant urge to fuss with Jyuudai's clothes and hair is in all likelihood related to a common expression of affection, since Jyuudai has no scales or fringes for her to groom.

He hasn't explained the compulsion to drop to all fours when she walks, but Yubel thinks she can easily explain that to herself. In the days following her transformation it was the only way to get around without being completely blinded by pain, and since then she has settled into a dragonish nature that insists she should have four legs, not two. She isn't sure which is most troublesome: any of these three, the feeling of uneasiness she cannot shake if she is not curled in a ball deep beneath Jyuudai's covers at night, the lingering clumsiness when she tries to do things like cutting her own food, the urge to hiss and strike out with claws and fanged teeth at the things, still far too many, that startle her in this form . . . and these are only the least of hundreds of things this body has brought with it.

One of those hundreds of things is a lingering weakness in her limbs when she tries to stand upright, forcing her to stand spraddle-legged like a man who is trying to hide that his last cup of wine was just one too many. Sometimes she wonders which will be more embarrassing, more shaming to Jyuudai on their wedding day if she cannot re-master walking by then—a slow and unsteady stagger as though she has taken to drink immediately before the ceremony, or an able, healthy scamper on arms and legs that are now almost exactly the same length.

It is such a thought—the cripple or the animal, the drunkard or the deformed being who cannot even be classified as a woman—that has driven her to ask Kanti for help that cannot be given from one of his many ancient texts, and it is for that reason that she is today tottering down the long and rocky slope between the castle and the Great Ridge, the place above town where many ceremonies of note are held. On one side of her is Kanti, holding her just above her elbow; on the other is Jyuudai, and that he must watch her take this walk this way is almost enough to make her simply duck into one of the crevices along the rock wall, pull her wings around herself, and hide until both of these men have gone away.

She is too focused on not falling to see the decently-sized rock that has fallen into the path and so, of course, she strikes it and falls. Catching herself is an easy matter—almost too easy, in fact. Her knee never even touches the ground, and the hands that stop her fall meet the path beneath her so lightly she doesn't even lift a scale (something both incredibly difficult and incredibly painful, and something she manages to do on a basis far too regular for her liking). No matter; the falling isn't what she fears anymore, even though Xaquirah has expressed concern that she has not yet begun using her wings to balance. What she fears is what will happen when she hits the ground—the clamour of things that are urges with odd, wordless voices. These voices will try to tell her yet again that she should simply run down to the feast below this way, or perhaps not go down among all those people at all but simply fling herself from this cliff and fly, discounting utterly that she has yet to actually fly instead of landing in a startled and twitching heap somewhere just below her takeoff point.

And so she sits on the ground, one foot beneath her, the other extended between her palms on the stones and scree, feeling the rapid beat of her heart and her breath trying to overtake her and make her bolt down the mountainside like an animal. She breathes, closes her eyes and breathes, and after a few moments Jyuudai sits beside her, puts his arms around her, lays his head on her shoulder, and presses against her side. She folds a wing around him almost without thinking about it, wanting the warmth and the human feel of him to help her back onto her feet. Sooner or later she has to be able to do this on her own, but right now she's simply trying not to flee off into midair or back up the path on all fours, wondering bitterly whose bright idea it was to use the blood of a _mountain_ dragon. One thing Xaquirah apparently never learned from Kanti or any other tutor: when trying to create a fierce dragon-warrior, using the properties of the shyest, most comparatively docile dragon breed is only slightly less stupid than poking said dragon with a stick.

Jyuudai sits with her a moment longer, then shifts and tilts his head so he can kiss the corner of her eye. "Come on," he says, and rubs her back between her wings with the heel of his hand. A shudder runs through her at the touch, and he stops long enough to kiss her cheek. "You can do this."

She nods, pulls her hand back from the path and reaches up for Kanti's arm. He raises his arm to pull her up as Jyuudai stands on her other side, supporting her, easing her to her feet. She takes a single shaky step over the rock and stops.

"You can do this," Jyuudai repeats, and strokes her arm. She takes another step forward, stops again, sways, quivers as her wing twitches away from the rock wall to their right.

"Were you born this difficult, or must you be bespelled so every day of the week?" Kanti asks, his tone the impatient one of a man with a pupil being deliberately backward. Yubel hisses—not in threat, simply stung by his words—and forces herself forward again, this time not lurching quite as much as she walks. She _will_ get to the bottom; this much she has promised herself.

But it will hurt.

They are announced at the end of the path by a palace servant who gives Yubel absolutely no time to take in the sheer amount of people ranged across the ridge—talking, dancing, laughing, children playing tag and peep-and-seek among the adults—before loudly calling their names: Samor Kitarrh kai-Jyuudai Prince-Defender of Amneth, heir to the crown of Delain; and the shorter and less imposing Samir Kitamh ka-Yubel. No title, and may the gods forbid anyone should introduce the fiancée of the crown prince as being Yubel of tamakh—the nowhere-lands, a child born on the road between Angon and Amneth as her unmarried parents fled the persecution faced by the Yaron nomads in the south of Delain.

Perversely, Yubel is thankful for this near-dismissal of her existence—even the comparatively short introduction they have granted her is at least seven syllables too long with all those eyes trained upward, not at Jyuudai, but at her, even though he is supposed to be the main attraction and she the mere add-on. Jyuudai pretends not to notice—he, after all, is used to those hundreds of eyes—but Yubel wants once again to pull him into a dark corner and shield them both from that wave of close gazes with her wings. Instead she lets him lead her to one of the smaller tables intended for the older folk and younger children who are unable to stand for hours at a time, even at the town feast celebrating Summertide. He draws out a bench and lays his cloak over it; although there's likely not a single person in all the town foolish enough to take the seat of the crown prince, Jyuudai prefers to avoid confusion by leaving a sign that he intends to sit. Then he takes Yubel's hand.

She is still intensely aware that conversation is muted, eyes following the two of them as they make their way to the heavily-laden trestle tables where the women of the town—and, yes, in some cases the men, as well—have brought their own special dishes to share with their neighbours. Tonight she and Jyuudai will serve themselves, just like every other person in this town. Part of this, she knows, is because Jyuudai is a social kind of person who welcomes the casual conversation of his subjects, but part of it—and she needs no special power to know it—is because Jyuudai wants people to see that while Yubel is far from harmless, neither is she a mindless and vicious monster ready to tear all of Amneth to pieces. This was Kanti's advice—to let the townsfolk see her acting exactly like the human girl she once was, instead of trying to make her look like a fierce guardian and warrior.

And so Yubel follows her fiancé down the line of the tables, painfully aware that they are late and that it is because of her that their arrival was tardy, feeling the bore of eyes on the back of her head as she serves herself, trying to find meat that has already been cut so people will not see her fighting for basic control over a table knife. This, at least, is easy to find; kebab-meat is a common Summertide favourite because of how quickly it cooks, and she chooses two skewers of what she thinks is either chicken or rabbit before Jyuudai cheerfully notes that someone—probably the blacksmith's wife, if Yubel has her guess—has brought a large pot of loveberries cooked in some kind of sweet sauce. Yubel prefers her fruit raw, but she lets Jyuudai serve her some of them anyway. The last idea she wants anyone getting is that she eats nothing but meat now.

At last they sit and are at least marginally out of the public eye; although people will still watch, it's accepted practice in Delain that approaching an eating couple is beyond rude, and Yubel takes refuge in that custom to at least try to enjoy the food she once all but inhaled, back in the days when she and Jyuudai were still just friends who attended the Summertide festival together out of nothing more than a sense of camaraderie. Now she can barely feed herself. Jyuudai, though, refuses to let her troubles dampen his own sense of enthusiasm, or his intentions of making her smile, and after she almost keeps from fumbling with a spoonful of soup Jyuudai reaches over and presses his fingers to her lips, grinning.

"They're sweet," he says, and she opens her mouth to taste the sweet-tart flavour of rinberries against her tongue. She accepts the fruit willingly, then flicks her tongue against the tips of his fingers to see if she can startle him into jumping. She doesn't succeed, but his surprised blink is enough to make her forget her fangs long enough to grin mischievously at him over his hand.

Then someone screams.

The sound is both high and piercing, and if not bespelled by Xaquirah's finest sorcery Yubel probably would have nicked Jyuudai's fingers on her fangs when she jerks away in a combination of surprise and pain. Dragons' ears are not the keenest there are, but they come close, and so it's little surprise that Yubel hears Jyuudai speak her name softly—only her name, nothing more, but in only two syllables she hears everything, even as she hears people behind her crying out that it's a child, a child has fallen—

She ignores the pain in her legs and runs, shoving aside someone standing in her way. Only much later will it occur to her that the redheaded man she sent sprawling was Sibyatin, the blacksmith who worked with her father, and someone who once upon a time could easily have picked her up and made firewood of her, as the folk in the eastern part of Delain are wont to say. Now, though, she is not thinking of having knocked down one of the most important men in Amneth, nor of the rip she puts in her bright blue sarabi when she stumbles—over what she does not see—and lands on one knee. Yubel has abandoned thought, and as soon as her hands hit the ground to stop her fall she digs her claws into the thin soil that covers the rock and pushes _up_, a single fluid motion that sends her out over the steep edge of the cliff, wings spread.

There is a dot of pink on the side of the cliff.

If asked to think about how she might go about flying, Yubel would never have gotten off the ground at all, and turning is still far beyond her even when she has been driven to the air by pure instinct. Her attempt at a dive is anything but graceful and she finds herself scrabbling at the heavy-wooded iron pines growing from the side of the cliff to keep from simply falling the rest of the way herself, but once she has stopped she is able to press herself easily against the cracks and blocks of the granite and marble. This is the sort of terrain mountain dragons live in, and she could feel uncomfortable in it no more than she could in Jyuudai's arms. She digs her claws in between the cracks in the stone and pulls herself up alongside the little girl—the one who is scraped up but alive, screaming but holding on, saved by an iron pine and a lucky jut of rock just big enough to grasp.

"Be still!" she commands, and the girl's cries of terror desist at once. "I can help you, but you must trust me."

The girl—who has a face Yubel can _almost_ recognise—nods. Yubel pushes aside the nagging feeling that she would know the child's parents on sight, along with the thought that accompanies it: _parents? You're sure there are two?_ Instead she focuses on the unlucky _chipin_ who had the ill-luck to wander too near an edge, and on how precisely she plans to get them out of here.

There is no flying straight up a cliff face.

At last—and by "at last" she means perhaps thirty seconds later—she comes to the conclusion that she will have to use the other mobility skill her new form has given her. And so—not looking at the girl because even the slightest bit of doubt in her face will take away what little resolve Yubel has managed to build—she looks straight up, and digs her claws further into the rock, ignoring the pain as she does.

"Take your right hand from the branch and put it on my arm," she says, and when she feels the girl comply almost at an instant she very nearly breathes a sigh of relief. "Don't lose contact with me," she continues. "But put your arm around my neck."

The tiny hand moves—slowly but without pause—up Yubel's arm, across her shoulder, and then stops.

"I can't!"

"You can," Yubel says, knowing precisely why the girl is protesting. "As soon as you've a grip you'll shift your left hand, too."

The girl lets out a terrified squeak. Yubel remains silent, even though the pain in her hands is starting to creep down her fingers. At last the chipin complies, locking her hands together around Yubel's neck pig-a-back style, her knees clamped tightly to either side of Yubel's waist beneath her wings without instruction. Good. Very good.

So far.

Now it is Yubel's turn.

She looks up at the cliff, eyes searching out a handy spot, and then pulls her right hand away and upward. Her body swings out as she does, and the chipin on her back lets out a tiny cry. Yubel would give her a word, but she is focusing all her energy and concentration on how to get up what looks like an arc's length and is really a piece of cliff perhaps two storeys tall—still no slouch to climb.

Her body swings again when she moves her left claw, and she twitches her wings to stay flat along the cliff. She doesn't relish being peeled off by a crosswind and sent tumbling into the valley far below, with its sharp tree-tops and hard ground. She might survive the fall, but there is no way any human child would.

Next her feet; her new form is not nearly so flexible as her human one, but it has come with absolutely incredible range of motion in her legs for exactly this purpose, and she arches her back out and twitches her wings the other way so she can swing her leg up almost between her hands without danger. The motion propels them both upward by almost half a body's-length, and she reaches up with her right hand to swing them the other half of that length.

She moves rapidly up the side of the cliff, the little girl's arms still around her neck. She shifts to press herself more closely into the space that was once the area between Yubel's shoulderblades, and her knee slips in the gathered fabric beneath Yubel's right arm. She screams again, this time directly into Yubel's ear. Yubel fights a wince. That battle she almost wins.

"Don't move."

It's risky, but more risky is leaving the fold of fabric where the girl can get first caught and then pulled down by it, and so she lets go of the cliff with one hand, wishing bitterly she had a third with which to re-sheath a particular weapon she wishes she could draw. Instead she uses her claws to tear the knot, having to move slowly to avoid overtoppling the very edge of balance. Then she tugs as lightly as she can on the fabric.

"Let it fall."

The girl on her back moves her left arm, pressing it against the side of Yubel's neck to let her pull the fabric away. The top half of the sarabi falls, then catches on Yubel's foot. She resists the urge to hiss a curse between her teeth and digs her claws back into the side of the rock before moving her foot long enough to let the sarabi—a gift from Jyuudai's parents intended specifically for today—fall into the valley below. Then she pushes upward again, dressed now only in what she wore beneath it.

She swarms up the wall, cursing hands that have changed from hands into chunks of burning agony, feeling a scale on her left foot lift on a splinter of rock, looking up at her more human hand and almost not believing that there is no blood flowing from it. That is, after all, what she was made for—to be an impenetrable defence—but it seems almost as though pain of the kind she is feeling in her hands _must_ be accompanied by blood. Surely no simple ache could ever be this great. At last she feels her hand touch a place where there is only air, and she finds a rock at the top of the cliff to grasp so she can swing her leg up.

Jyuudai and Kanti are there, and she feels Kanti wrap his hands around her left wrist, Jyuudai taking her right, to pull her up. Yubel rolls her shoulders to indicate to the little girl that she can get off. Then she stands, swaying on her feet, as a man steps out of the crowd. She sees his face and wants to groan. She knows precisely who he is, and who the little girl is: Siahvana, daughter of Riban of Amneth and Aimah, born of Amneth, her current whereabouts unknown. Yubel wonders how many cups of wine and beer he's managed to make his way through; the way he is standing, a far less steady version of her own wide-legged stance, seems to indicate far too many, and she senses Jyuudai putting a hand on the chipin's shoulder.

"Get away from my kid," the town drunkard says, and Yubel fights a low hiss. "I don't want that unnatural bitch putting a curse on her."

Out of the corner of her eye Yubel sees Jyuudai's mouth thin down to a single line, and she resists the urge to get in between them. Already she is drawing strange looks, and she has no illusions as to why. Beneath her sarabi was not a silk robe but a kind of modified soldier's clothing—a soft-leather top with only one arm, for ease in drawing and throwing a knife or shooting a bow, and a pair of short-trousers that sit on her hips and tie off just above her knees, so as not to impede her if she must run. Strapped to one thigh is a short-sword, and beneath her other arm, just below the place where a breast should be, are two of the throwing-knives called dirkens. Those with eyes to see what they look at can look at the golden bracelet-cuff on her right wrist and see the weapon she dared not draw earlier: not a bracelet at all, but a concealed blade that can be snapped open with a specific turn of the wrist and used like a knife with a handle made of an entire arm. Even to a casual festival, Yubel has come armed to the teeth. So much for blending in.

"I'll say nothing now because you're in drink, and wine makes wise men into fools," Jyuudai says, and Yubel can hear cold steel in his voice. "But say no more, or the law will stand."

Riban the drunkard laughs. "The law _you_ don't got to follow, ayuh?" He takes a stumble-step forward, and Yubel is between them, her hands and her throbbing left foot forgotten, before she can think.

"Another step and we'll see who leaves here with a curse on their head, kai-Riban," she tells him. "Greater and lesser men than you have been convicted of treason."

He looks ready to go on until she puts a hand on the dagger belted behind her short-sword, and then he snarls at her like a dog. Dirkens and daggers have been Yubel's weapon of choice ever since she and Jyuudai ranged together as children, and her skill at the throw is all but legendary within the province of Amneth as much for her accuracy as for her ability to throw double-handed. In spite of his verdict on her—_unnatural bitch_, a view she's sure at least some of the town shares—she feels a certain dark amusement. _I think I'm more human now than Riban of Amneth was ever in his greatest hour,_ she thinks, and watches as someone grabs his arm to pull him back before he can get the idea to charge her and try to knock her over the side. His daughter—a chipin not an hour past seven's year if she's a single day—is standing here, crying with Jyuudai's hand on her shoulder, and it is this more than anything that makes Yubel hold her pull. It isn't the child's fault her father is a drunkard both foolish and poison-mean when he's imbibed; she should not have to watch his blood spill.

One thing Yubel has learned—and that Kanti professed himself ignorant of—is that dragons can force themselves not to blink, even more so than human beings can. And so she stares into Riban's bloodshot and somewhat yellowed eyes, fighting a hard battle between herself and herself to keep from hissing and flaring her wings in challenge. At last he lets out a derisive snort and pushes unsteadily back into the crowd. Yubel relaxes her hold on her dagger.

The group disperses, trying to pick up where they left off before Yubel took her dive off the side of the cliff. One of the women approaches Jyuudai timidly, her head bowed. Jyuudai speaks kindly to her when she approaches, his anger directed not at the woman reaching for the girl Yubel pulled from the cliff but at the man who tried to call her rescue an attempted curse. The girl, Siahvana of Delain, unlucky daughter of a beggared sot, hides herself behind the woman's skirt. Yubel fights to stay upright. Her hands and feet feel as though someone has dipped them in birch-tar and then set them afire. If not for the pain and the dire situation, she would have enjoyed the climb, but at this moment she simply wants a quiet corner she can curl up in until her legs have stopped shaking.

Jyuudai must know it, too, because after exchanging a few short words with the woman who has come to take the girl he excuses himself, reaches for Yubel's hand, and leads her through the crowd, stroking her arm with his free hand. There is a place on the other side of the rock—not a cave, exactly, but a deep indentation, a dimple in the face of the earth—and he pulls her gently into it and then to her knees, stroking her back and wings.

"What he said isn't true," Jyuudai says. Yubel remains silent. There was never love lost between her family and Riban's folk, but the animosity he showed her cliffside is new, and it stings in a way even Jyuudai's most gentle touch is unable to soothe. She just sits in his arms, taking a moment to come all back to herself, folding a wing over to hide them both. Jyuudai rests his head against her shoulder.

"I love you," he says, and squeezes her hand gently. Yubel wishes she could squeeze back, but the possibility of breaking his fingers is far too real and dangerous, and so she settles for rubbing the back of his hand with her thumb. She hears the music on the far side of the cliff's back and tries not to let Jyuudai hear her sigh.

"We should go back," she says, and Jyuudai nods. Then he lifts her hand to his lips and kisses it. Yubel takes in a sharp breath of surprise—the pain in her hand is not gone, far from it, but in a matter of seconds the burning sensation in her fingers has disappeared, leaving behind only the dull ache beneath to which she has almost grown accustomed. Jyuudai looks up at her, his eyes full of concern, and Yubel thinks she would blush if she were still capable of it.

"Are you all right?"

"It . . . . helped," she answers, both embarrassed and a little gratified that he still cares enough to worry. Then he takes her other hand and kisses the palm, and she forgets about being embarrassed in favour of more fully enjoying the feel of his lips against her hand. It's at such moments of simple pleasure that Yubel thinks she can appreciate what it will mean to become his mate, if that should ever happen. He smiles up at her and then stands, pulling her to her feet and then standing on his toes to kiss her on the mouth this time.

There is a sound behind them, and Yubel pulls as she spins, ready to defend Jyuudai if someone has decided he'd make a good target—but it is only Kanti, carrying a bundle in his arms.

"I've not the slightest idea how to tie one of these," he tells her, and then Yubel realises what the bright yellow bundle is—a rolled sarabi, one she recognises from the clothes press she now shares with Jyuudai. "But you can't walk around that way. That fool with the loose mouth is only one of the folk who won't like seeing all that sharpage."

Yubel nods and takes the sarabi, draping it over her shoulder, wrapping it around twice and tucking it. This one is neither fancy nor particularly adorned—it is made for common wear, not dress—but it covers her, and when Jyuudai has fixed the back of it the side drapes in a way that could almost be taken as ornamental. Kanti looks her over.

"It works," he says, and then, after a pause, "I wouldn't worry about that idiot too long, if I were you. People go out of their way to disagree with Riban of Amneth on sheer principle. By the end of the week you'll have sworn fealty from near every person here tonight."

Yubel nods. Kanti's advice is often bizarre, but rarely unsound. And so she lets Jyuudai take her hand and lead her back to the music, and when they have finished their meals she allows him to lead her into the crowd of dancing couples to take a turn upon the flat marble that recommends this site as a festival-place.

The only dance she is capable of is one with slow steps and not much to complicate it, but she manages it almost gracefully, and when it is done she has come to a conclusion: she will walk to Jyuudai unsupported and with her head held high on their wedding day. Let the Ribans of the world be damned; she will bring pride to her husband and the crown.

She will. She will.


End file.
